Popularity: 0
Vote:   | And I just thought, this is what I want to be. And I knew that dancing would be my chosen profession. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | And I think it was important that I learned to love to dance eventually for its own sake, as opposed to wanting to be a ballerina. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | As soon as I hear music, something in me starts to vibrate. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | But what was my motivation was music, and the fact that I love to move around. I'm always moving around. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | Even though I am a professional, and I know what the steps are, I don't quite know how I'm going to do them, because I haven't lived that moment yet. I always feel very insecure and I get very excited. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | I could work out a lot of my emotions by going to class and dancing. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | I didn't care too much for ballet, because you had to be more disciplined, and you sort of looked like everyone else. It required a certain kind of conformity that I didn't feel like I wanted to do. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | I didn't have any doubts about my choice of career, but I had constant doubts about my ability, yes. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | I don't believe you can be an honest performer and a spectator at the same time. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | I had a wonderful childhood, coming from Cincinnati, and I think that it was great going into the life that I was going to have, where you have to start young as a dancer. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | I had two sisters, and we would love to get dressed up and pretend that we were chic, sophisticated ladies. And I think that was a great sort of preparation, in a way. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | I learned to love dance for its own sake. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | I liked Latin, I like languages, I liked all the myths, and the Roman tales that we were required to translate in Latin, and all these interesting people who were never quite what they thought they would be or seemed to be. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | I liked math. Counting was easy for me, which was good, because a lot of the ballets have involved difficult counts. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | I liked tap, because I liked hearing the results of my movements. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | I liked to read but, being a dancer, I didn't have a lot of time to read. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | I loved tests because it was another form of competing, a healthy competition. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | I still feel like a 15 year-old girl coming to New York. Dancing does that to you. I think it keeps you really young. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | I think especially in a world where you have so little say about what goes on in your life, or in the politics of the world around you, it is wonderful to go into that studio, and tell yourself what to do. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | I used to love to play dress-up, where you get your mother's or your grandmother's dresses and high heels. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | I was grateful that I had dancing to fall back on. It was my survival tactic. It was my friend. It was always there. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | I was very happy that I was as normal as possible before I went into serious dance. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | I was very much of a tomboy. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | I'm thought of as a cool, unemotional dancer, but inside I'm not. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | In fact, ballet companies did not exist in the Midwest when I was a child. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | It brought out in me the person whom I had the potential to become. I think that's why I loved it for its own sake, not to be a ballerina. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | It's a wonderful thing to be able to dance, to tell your body what you want it to do. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | It's ungrateful to be wishing you were doing something else at the moment you are living. You haven't lived in the moment that you are really living, you are wishing you were somewhere else. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | My feelings started to change when I realized that dancing was getting inside my body, emotionally, as well as physically. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | My mother was very interested in giving her daughters the advantage of music and dance, if we had an interest in it. My father was not. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | Of course, in the art class, I was the model. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | On the other hand, I think it is wonderful for everyone to take ballet classes, at any age. It gives you a discipline, it gives you a place to go. It gives you some control in your life. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Once I started dancing, I was not the spoiled brat or the rebellious child that I was as a child. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | People think that you get out there, and you become someone else, Dulcinea or the gypsy, and that the whole rest of the world doesn't exist. But that's not true. Yes, you don't see a lot of things that are going on around you, but you very much know what is happening in this world that you are in. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | School was fun. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | So dancing was not something I had a great desire to do. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | So I think it is rather strange that I got into ballet, something that I hadn't seen. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | That the work involved, the willingness to take chances, the commitment, the opportunity to get on stage and make people happy, was more important than becoming famous, or even what I was dancing. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | The body can do amazing things in a situation when it is really called for. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | The particular ballet was not so important as the fact that I was physically healthy, and capable of getting out there and dancing as often as possible. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | The wonderful thing about life it that there will always be variables. You have to see them and be aware of them to know how to react to them. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | There is pain and sacrifice in everyone's world. That's why, when I was dancing, I had no pain. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | We had acrobatic, and ballet, and tap, and I much preferred acrobatics, being an extension of my tomboyishness. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | When you are on stage, you don't see faces. The lights are in your eyes and you see just this black void out in front of you. And yet you know there is life out there, and you have to get your message across. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | When you get on stage, you can be anything. You are removed from reality in a way, the real world. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | You don't learn from a situation where you do something well. You enjoy it and you give yourself credit, but you don't really learn from that. You learn from trial and error, trial and error, all the time. |